The Finish Line

I've reached the end of my project and with a few touches added to my final piece and an essay about what my project has been about I have completed all I needed to in the last week.

When I was writing about my project it was very helpful to have my blog and to have all my sketchbook work by my side to help me explain everything I have done. I reached a conclusion about my project when I was writing a final paragraph for my essay. My project is very much a piece itself. Since my work has been about development, change and mark making it is amazing to look back at how my ideas have developed. This makes my actual project very much part of one whole piece. Each process done, idea written down and mark made is hugely important, because all those things make up the principle reason for why I made the final piece that I made.

My project started by looking at Dieter Roth and accounts and diaries and my whole project itself has been one huge account. Time has passed, changes have been made and most importantly: Some parts of my project have been discarded or forgotten about while others have been developed, continued and made to stand out.

Finishing Piece Progress

After a few hours of working on the large piece of paper I decided to step back and take some photographs and think about what I have done.
 I chose a very powerful image from the telegraph newspaper to be my central image in black. I chose an image of a flag being taken down in a desert space in Afghanistan by two soldiers. The caption on the front page reads 'The Long War quietly ends'. Since my project has been focused on newspaper stories and world events and the way in which stories reoccur and change over time. For more than thirteen years the war in Afghanistan has been a constant in world news and especially so in British media. I believe that by blending the image of the two soldiers in with the other newspaper article images we are reminded that amongst all other world tragedies and events the war has been a constant and although the war is not over this image is a symbol of the British troops stepping out of Afghanistan. The image of a flag flying at half mast shown in this picture is also hugely powerful as it could be interpreted as a sign of respect to the servicemen and women who gave their lives for their country, it also reminds us that the journey is not completely over for many of these men and women.
I will be continuing to work into this piece but I will be making it clear that some stories stand out to me and others more than  others.

Final Piece Planning

Since I've been back at school from the Christmas holidays I have had a lot of work to do. With a final piece needing to be produced very soon I started to get straight down to it.

I realised quickly that a lot of my work and explanations have been written in my blog and less has been written in my actual sketch book. I have worked hard over the last week to confirm all my research and back up to my pieces. I think it important to work out what I want to do for my final piece and prepare thoroughly.

While I was working on my individual screen-prints I experimented with a large piece of paper and did multiple layered and single prints on it. I plan on working into this for my final piece, taking inspiration from the artists Rauschenberg and Ian McKeever. I want to bring together all aspects of my project so far.

Scale and sizes have played a big part of my project, I've spent a lot of time looking at newspapers and the variety of different scales that are used to show a range of importance within each story written about. I plan to project a newspaper image and draw on to the large piece of paper. I also plan on working with different materials and working into the image.

I am exited to see the piece gradually change, I am also interested to see what affect the development has on the original prints.

I have also been working hard to keep my wall looking exiting and different, I plan on always having ideas developing.

BP Portrait Awards

At the moment I am at home due to the fact it’s the Christmas holidays. Since I’ve been on holiday I been limited with the amount of practical work I can do for my coursework  however I have been reviewing my work and thinking about what I can work on when I return to school. Today I visited the National Portrait Gallery to view the BP portrait awards. I was stunned by the amazing quality of some of the pieces and could hardly believe some of the paintings weren’t photographs. A lot of the portraits painted were done of the artist’s family members, the fact that the portraits were of family members meant that there was a sense of connection between the viewer and the figure depicted. The artist had conveyed not only what they saw but also what they knew to be true to the person, there was a story behind each expression. Each painting was amazing in its own way, but some of them really stood out for me.
One of my favourite portraits was a painting of a seated woman named Jean Woods painted by Richard Twose. The painting is colourful and slightly abstract, the sitter glances out at the viewer. I looked at Twose in more detail and was interested to hear about the way in which he talks about his work. Twose describes his work as abstract yet he finds little satisfaction in abstract work so he always finds himself looking back at the subject. At the moment he is focussing on portraiture and painting figures inside rooms. ‘At the moment I’m working on figures in rooms. Interiors, as a theme, are introspective, unlike landscapes which are by nature expansive and outward-looking. By putting my figures in rooms they are contained, defined by these enclosed spaces.’ His painting of Jean Woods won the second place prize in the BP portrait awards.

Photograph updates

Over the last several days I have been updating my sketchbook and completing more screen-prints. I thought I would keep you updated by putting up some photos of my recent progress.  On the left is a photograph of the monochrome screen-prints which have been layered on top of each other. I think the image is really interesting, as you can see some articles have disappeared and some come through the layers. Some parts of the image are very clear but other parts are blurred and distorted. 

The below image is a photograph of a drawing of some layered images. The drawing was created using a variety of media, I used ink, pencil, crayon and different kinds of pencils.

Page Progress

Progress on my wall

Over the last ten days I have been working a lot with screen printing. I have been following my plan to work with the newspaper pages which I collected.

The layered pieces are already looking extremely interesting, and its great to see some stories being lost under other stories and some images and words coming through strongly. As well as sticking to my plan which was creating coloured and monochrome pieces as well as layered and individual pieces, I have decided to create one large scale image. This image has several of the prints on it in different colours and I hope to work into them with drawing and projection after I have finished with all the prints.



Close up image of layered newspaper traces

Layered newspaper traces

Through using screen-printing as my method of production I have ended up with lots of spare photocopies on tracing paper of the newspaper pages. These spare pieces have worked to my advantage as much like the prints they layer together really well and create great images. Looking at them in more detail made me think about simple experimental processes I could explore on the side while continuing to work with printing. I have used several of the copies and started tracing them in to my own image, and I plan on using a light box to help me create more hand drawn pictures. I also think that these tracing paper copies could be bound together and put towards the series of books I'll be making with my finished products.

One of the key aspects of my project is looking at the way in which physical and virtual things meet. The newspaper pages I have collected are very physical things yet you can read the same articles and news online. The news websites are constantly changing and being updated this is similar to the way in which the newspapers are developed every day. One choses which articles they would like to read and they follow them, some stories are repeatedly published and updated over a few months and some stories appear for one day and are never thought of again.
By taking photographs of the newspapers they return to the virtual world.

An internet news page allows you to follow single stories much like a paper does and eventually it alters itself for you. Internet pages like YouTube alter themselves to suggest things that you would like to see. They register what you have watched, read or looked up and find similar things for you too look at. The personal aspect of these websites relates back to the diary theme of my project, as I started this project with a personal investigation. 



My little book

The booklet presented in my sketchbook

To present my completed pieces I plan on using a book format. I think using a book format is highly relevant as it relates to the autobiographical diary theme I am going for throughout my project. I think that the way in which a book flows and changes relates to my project.

I have experimented by creating a tiny book made up of telegraph magazine covers that I have taken from a piece made shown in the Telegraph magazine to celebrate their 50th anniversary.  The covers are in order of date and gradually show the change in style and format that the magazine has gone for. The covers also demonstrate a sense of time, as they reveal cover stories which were at one point in time highly significant.